(NewsNation) — A surgeon whom Sen. Tammy Duckworth credits with saving her life is among the group of doctors unable to leave Gaza amid a total military siege of the crossing, NewsNation has learned.

Dr. Adam Hamawy, a New Jersey-based plastic surgeon, is part of a group of doctors who volunteered to provide medical care in Gaza. Two doctors from that group told NewsNation Monday they are stuck in the enclave without safe passage following Israel’s seizure of the Rafah border last week. 

Hamawy was a surgeon in Iraq in 2004 and treated Duckworth after a Black Hawk helicopter she was piloting was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. She lost her legs and partial use of her arms in the attack.

“One of the surgeons who helped save my life, Adam Hamawy, described my leg injuries to me years later as ‘mud and blood, that’s all there was,'” Duckworth wrote in Chicago Magazine.

On Tuesday, Duckworth, a Democrat from Illinois, posted on X that she is in direct contact with Hamawy and is “working hard to secure his group’s immediate evacuation.”

Duckworth called on Israeli leaders to immediately open the Rafah border in Gaza as more than a dozen American medical workers are unable to evacuate. 

“Aid workers and innocent civilians should always be protected,” Duckworth posted on the social media site.

“The Netanyahu admin must work to open the Rafah crossing, support evacuations and allow much more aid in,” she wrote.

Hamawy told NewsNation Duckworth is “doing what a senator should be doing.”

“I know she’s doing everything she can. We’re thankful for that,” he said, adding that she’s the only legislator who has been in direct touch with them.

Hamawy recalls the care he administered to Duckworth almost 20 years ago when he was an Army surgeon assigned to a combat support hospital in Baghdad.

“It stands out because I didn’t get a lot of helicopter pilots that survived being shot down, and she was definitely the only one I took care of … [with] that kind of injury,” he said.

Hamawy said he’s taken care of hundreds of patients, and Duckworth was one of the few that still stands out in his mind.

“She was awake and had devastating injuries, and the only thing that she was asking was … how was her crew, and she was the one that was injured the worst,” he said.

At the time Hamawy didn’t know that Duckworth would go on to become a U.S. senator and was only fulfilling his duty of care.

He said the patients he’s seeing now could also go on to do great things, which is why every life has to be valued.

“I did not know she was going to become a senator, but all these people that get injured, all these children that we’re taking care of right now, who knows what they’re going to become, who knows if they are going to become a doctor. Maybe it’s someone that’s going to lead Palestine to peace,” Hamawy said.

Hamaway said the situation unfolding in Gaza is more horrific than any war he’s ever witnessed. 

“The extent of damage is beyond anything that I’ve seen before,” he said. 

Dr. Mohamad Abdelfattah, from Southern California, and Dallas-based Dr. Mahmoud Sabha, who are on the same medical mission, told NewsNation that they had still not received word on a safe exit Tuesday morning. 

The group went to Gaza on May 1 as part of a medical mission at the European Hospital with the Palestinian American Medical Association. 

Their group was scheduled to leave Rafah Monday so another mission could take over the aid work but have since been told there is no longer a safe route to exit the besieged strip after Israeli troops seized control of Gaza’s Rafah border crossing last week. They were both sheltering at the hospital Monday evening as they waited for a way out.

“Since the Rafah invasion, the crossings and the route to cross have not been safe from what we were told, and so they [the organization] are working on coordinating a safe exit for us. That’s all that we know,” Abdelfattah told NewsNation via a phone interview Monday.

Abdelfattah, an intensive care unit doctor, said there were potentially 20 to 30 more Americans along with them at the European Hospital who were also unable to evacuate.  

“We’re all waiting to get more concrete information,” Sabha told NewsNation, adding he was hopeful they would get word of an exit route soon. The medical organization had a team waiting on the other side in Egypt, he said, and he hoped they could come in once his team was allowed to leave.

A State Department spokesperson told NewsNation on Monday it is aware of reports of U.S. citizen doctors unable to leave Gaza, adding the U.S. government has no control over the border crossing or who is permitted to depart Gaza.

The Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not return a request for comment by NewsNation on the American doctors unable to evacuate from Rafah.

The Rafah crossing into Egypt has been closed since Israeli troops seized it a week ago. Israel gained full control over the entry and exit of people and goods for the first time since it withdrew soldiers and settlers from Gaza in 2005, though it has long maintained a blockade of the coastal enclave in cooperation with Egypt.

No food has reportedly entered the two main border crossings in southern Gaza for the past week, the New York Times reported. It is a region that had been sheltering 1.3 million Palestinians, many of whom have fled since Israel took control of the crossing.

The doctors have described “horrific” conditions inside the European Hospital, where there are mass shortages of medical supplies and staff and abhorrent sanitary conditions giving way to flies and other insects swarming inside the facility. 

The exodus of Palestinians from Gaza’s last refuge accelerated Sunday as Israeli forces pushed deeper into the southern city of Rafah.

Some 300,000 of the more than 1 million civilians sheltering there had fled the city by Monday following evacuation orders from Israel, which said it must invade to dismantle Hamas and return hostages taken from Israel in the Oct. 7 attack. 

Waiting to evacuate has been hard, Abdelfattah said, but it’s nothing compared to what Gazans are facing. 

“For the people of Gaza who have been trapped and have been suffering, they have far greater tests and tribulations than us.”